Woodworking is the debut novel from former TV critic, current TV writer, and podcast chaos monster (complimentary) Emily St. James. It's the story of Erica, a thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher and trans-woman who just clued herself in on what's been going on with her gender bullshit, and Abigail, a seventeen-year-old trans-woman nearing two years into things and how, living in a small South Dakota town, they form a seemingly unlikely but inevitable friendship.
This is less a review and more a collection of random thoughts/observations. I've tried to talk around some of the larger spoilers in the book. While I've mostly succeeded, if you're a "reading for plot" sort you may want to hold off and finish the book.
Woodworking offers some interesting inversions of the ur-disaster friendship of literary transes, Maria Griffiths and James Hanson. In Binnie's anointed classic a twenty-nine-year-old Maria finds James, twenty, in Star City Nevada, clocks him as a trans-woman who doesn't know she's trans, and decides that a hole in her life will be filled if she mentors this small-town stoner into womanhood.
With Abigail and Erica, St. James doubles that age gap to seventeen and thirty-five, gives the teenager the "suspect and bitter" trans wisdom, and it's Erica who's taking those first awkward steps into transition (with, fortunately, a bit more self-awareness than James). Erica craves the mentorship and friendship she thinks Abigail can provide and the "experienced" Abigail is the one trying to keep Erica at arm's length, protesting too much as only a teenager can for much of the book.
The power dynamic looms large in the background -- not so much in the relationship itself: Erica a good teacher, wants Abigail to succeed and do well -- but instead in Erica's fear and anxiety about the presumed inappropriateness of it all in a small South Dakota city in the deep Trump country of 2016.
Woodworking is interested in these intergenerational dynamics, both in the physical ages of its characters as well as their relative "trans-age". Without spoiling too much, Abigail and Erica travel to a trans support group in Sioux Falls and, eventually, the story of a gen-x trans-women gets told -- a couple of years older than me. She outranks Erica and Abigail in both age categories -- starting hormones in 1989 at sixteen, running away from home to escape a physically and emotionally abusive household, and then re-closeting herself into the life of a cis-passing woman -- the wordworking of the book's title.
And [SPOILERS A] wasn't woodworking. She was out there, every day, fighting. Octavia didn't see herself in you, [SPOILERS B]. She saw [SPOILERS A]. You could have been different, you should have been different.
Instead, you invented a burden you could never bear. [Your husband] never asked you to consider it a burden. He merely asked you to love him unconditionally. But you also knew that "unconditionally" meant loving the parts of him that could only see you as the person you pretended to be, the person who made his life easier ... You learned how to be the person he needed you to be, and you forgot how to be yourself.
I didn't have the blessing/curse this fictional woman did, of knowing at sixteen, but I think St. James has zeroed in on a distinctive choice that women of my generation took on for ourselves -- inventing a burden we could never bear. Whether carving out a quotidian trans-womanhood from the scraps available, embracing the genderfuck of outsider culture, or compartmentalizing our lives to carve out a space for something we'd swear was just a femme persona, too many of us thought we had to invent a world from scratch for ourselves. We rarely talked to each other, and turned away from the next generation out of ego and shame.
Woodworking is also interested in what the closet and transition can do to a marriage. To the cis world, where biphobia and erasure are still a thing, the most obvious reason so many marriages and partnerships don't survive transition is a sexuality mismatch -- and this does happen. Less visible, and more subtle, is the way that a bi/pan couple will continue on in the relationship, but where transition suddenly forces every red flag to the surface.
One of the passages in Nevada that slowly cut me to the quick during my first year of transition and the "slow, then fast" end to my relationship is this one.
James just doesn’t know how to be in a relationship because he doesn’t know how to be himself and you can’t be one of the people in a relationship if you’re busily refusing to be a person.
A trans-woman who needs to transition and who can't or won't is, as best, half a partner. St. James tackles this in a way I haven't seen done before -- with some empathy for the cis partner's point of view.
"No, I don't. But the decision you make traps me inside of it because I was stupid enough to fall in love with you." She drops four packages of ice cream sandwiches in the cart. "Twice"
This feeling of being trapped in your partner's decision, of suddenly having to contend with something they've had years to contend with internally -- it is a lot, and the support structures and therapist industrial complex don't have good models for partners of emerging trans-women. The pattern I've seen far too often is for the trans-woman's partner to linger in this resentment and shape it into a cudgel for every argument to come. To use it as leverage to keep their partner from coming out -- presuming (mistakenly) they're still dealing with that old, easily manipulated half-person and can still herd them to where they want them to be. The relationships that go on to thrive seem to be the ones that can rid themselves of this co-dependent dynamic.
Or as Erica herself will later observe
But a person's life is their own. Few sins are greater than trying to squeeze someone else into the shape you require them to be.
I find myself struggling a bit with the book's end. St. James leaves our characters with ambiguous futures -- women come together, women share intense experiences and change, and women start to ambiguously drift apart again. St. James is a TV writer and leaves things primed for the next season or spin-off series to come. Plenty of room to take a new meeting.
Narratively, it works and is satisfying. But it landed strange for me.
My sense is the women of Woodworking want their transition to be a lateral move towards a "normal" middle-class aspiring American life. St. James sends them down different highways to that end, and some of the book's marketing suggests the same
I know a number of trans kids growing up as themselves. It’s not clear to me why when they reach adulthood, they should have to say, “by the way, I’m trans.” There is this idea in our brains that trans solidarity necessarily requires no anonymity.
And like -- I get it. I wouldn't stand in the way of any woman wanting that for herself and pursuing it. It's a seductive idea -- more seductive than I'd like to admit given that the shape my life took means the chances of that for me were, and are, near nil. However, if I can push through the swirl of envy, jealousy, and perhaps even resentment in my heart, there are ways (fairly or not) chasing that dream can be an anesthetic towards the situation we all find ourselves in. The book seems aware of this in the story of that gen-x trans-woman -- but its characters also seem to draw a different set of conclusions than I would.
Regardless -- it's to Woodworking's credit that I see enough of myself and my friends in these characters to have these sorts of complicated feelings about it. St. James has created a legible version of a certain sort of transition for a certain sort of woman and that's not an easy thing to accomplish in this world. I suspect, and hope, this book will find its audience and place in the trans femme literary canon.